Amazon's fulfillment centers receive freight on their schedule, not yours. Your carrier shows up with a full trailer at the appointment window. Amazon's dock is backed up. The driver waits two hours, three hours, sometimes longer. The carrier bills you for that time, typically $75 to $150 per hour depending on the contract. You either eat it or push back.
Most brands eat it. They don't know they can push back, or they've tried once, got nowhere, and stopped. Our Place pushed back. Here is what that actually looked like.
The situation at Our Place
During Prime Day prep in 2025, the team was trying to move large volumes into Amazon FCs from California warehouses. Oversized cookware, Wonder Ovens, Dream Cookers. The pieces are heavy and palletized. Receiving at Amazon's FCs slowed during high-volume periods, and carriers delivering into those facilities accumulated detention time that showed up on freight invoices.
The detention charges came from carriers, not from Amazon. Amazon doesn't bill you detention. The carrier bills you detention because Amazon held them at the dock. If you don't file a case against Amazon to recover those costs, you pay the carrier and Amazon pays nothing.
The team filed cases. They recovered the charges.
What Amazon actually requires to pay out
Amazon will not issue a credit based on your word that detention happened. They want documentation that establishes three things: your carrier had a confirmed delivery appointment, your carrier arrived on time, and the delay was on Amazon's side. Without all three, the case gets closed.
The specific documentation you need:
The delivery appointment confirmation. This is usually an email or a reference number from Amazon's carrier appointment system. The appointment time needs to be on the document.
The carrier's proof of arrival. Most carriers log this as an in-gate timestamp in their tracking system. Get this from your carrier before filing. It needs to show the driver arrived at or before the appointment window.
The carrier's detention invoice. Itemized, showing hours and rate. It should reference the specific delivery or BOL number.
The driver's departure timestamp if you can get it. This calculates the total time detained and validates the hours billed.
When you have all of that, you open a case through Seller Central under "FBA shipment" and state clearly: your carrier was held beyond the free time allowed at a confirmed appointment, you have documentation, and you are requesting reimbursement. Attach the documents. Name the amounts.
What happens when you file
Amazon's case team reviews the documentation. The first response is usually a template asking for more information, even if you submitted everything. Reply with exactly what they asked for. The second or third response is often a resolution.
Amazon does not publicize that this reimbursement pathway exists. There is no button that says "file for detention recovery." You are using the standard case filing system and making a financial claim. The key is being methodical: one case per shipment, clear amounts, clear documentation, no ambiguity about what you're asking for.
Recovery is not guaranteed. Amazon can decline cases where the documentation is incomplete or where the delay cannot be substantiated. If a driver didn't get an in-gate timestamp, you have a weaker case. If your carrier can only provide an estimate of arrival time rather than a logged record, Amazon will push back.
The real cost of not filing
Detention charges during peak season add up. At $100 per hour and a two-hour delay, that's $200 per delivery. If you're running 10 to 20 inbound shipments per month during Q4 prep, and 30 to 40 percent of them hit detention, the exposure is real. At Our Place, with the volume of oversized product moving through California warehouses into FBA, these were not trivial line items.
The cost isn't only the charge itself. When you accept detention charges without recovery, you're also accepting that Amazon's slow receiving is your financial problem. It isn't. The carrier had an appointment. Amazon didn't honor the window. That's a vendor-caused delay, and Amazon's own policies acknowledge it as a reimbursable event.
Brands that absorb these costs aren't saving effort. They're just not doing the math on what they're leaving behind.
What you need before the busy season
The time to build this process is not when you're already deep in Prime Day shipments.
Talk to your carriers now about in-gate timestamps. Make sure they log arrival times for every Amazon delivery. That one data point is what separates a recoverable case from an unrecoverable one.
Confirm you can retrieve appointment confirmations from your scheduling system. If you use Amazon's carrier appointment portal, those confirmations are in your account history. If your freight broker coordinates appointments, make sure they're forwarding confirmation emails to you and saving them.
Assign someone to file cases within 30 days of each shipment. Amazon has a time limit on case eligibility. Detention that happened 90 days ago is much harder to recover than detention from last month.
Building a case properly takes about 20 minutes the first time. After that, it's a template. The recovery per case isn't transformative, but across a year of FBA shipments into Amazon FCs, it is real money, and it belongs to you.
